The Trouble with Community: Anthropological Reflections on Movement, Identity and Collectivity

Summary

'Community' is one of social science's longest-standing concepts. The assumption of much social science has been that humans belong in communities, as social and cultural beings.

The trouble with 'community' is that this is not necessarily so; the personal social networks of individuals' actual experience crosscut collective categories, situations and institutions. Communities can prove unviable or imprisoning; the reality of community life and identity can often be very different from the ideology and the ideal.

In this book, the authors draw on their ethnographic experiences to reappraise the concept and the reality of 'community', in the light of globalisation, religious fundamentalism, identity politics, and renascent localisms. How might anthropology better apprehend social identities which are intrinsically plural, transgressive and ironic? What has anthropology to say about the way in which civil society might hope to accommodate the ongoing construction and the rightful expression of such migrant identities?

The right of Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

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CONTENTS

to Aiden and to Callum, our nascent migrants of identity

PROLOGUE: THE BOOK’S QUESTIONS

Nigel Rapport and Vered Amit

This book is a dialogue between two anthropologists; it concerns the conceptualization, the ideology and the practice of community in the contemporary world. All three of these dimensions of community involve a tension between efforts to fix social and political relations in communal frames and the considerable pressures toward individuation and fragmentation which regularly undo these efforts, but may also be constrained by them. The book offers a review and a reassessment of community as a political, legal, theoretical and ethnographic concept within anthropology.

As the new century begins, politico-economic restructuring continues further to embed local economies, economic networks and polities within global systems of production and labour and within transnational systems of law and political identity. The relation between work, place and family is reconfigured, new forms of mobility within and across state borders are precipitated, and new discourses concerning international relations – ‘subsidiarity’, ‘asylum seekers’, ‘human rights’ – are construed. These processes have frequently dislocated the conventional connections between individuals and taken-for-granted institutions and collectivities. Yet we also see in many parts of the world, popular and intellectual discourses of identity that insist on the political and ontological primacy of various forms of community. While capital moves with ever greater speed and freedom across state borders, while international law expands its translocal remit, migrants frequently face renewed barriers to their own movements. While the ‘postmodern turn’ in anthropology has rejected the fixity of expertise, place and boundaries, this does not appear to have dislodged a conventional expectation that the construction of community and culture – of ‘cultural community’ – will continue to situate both the ethnographic enterprise and its ethnographic subjects, perhaps all the more so when these are no longer fixed conveniently in singular places.

Our efforts as co-authors, as two anthropologists of modernity, is to grapple with these complexities in this book; in the process we bring to bear a range of ethnographic expertise and a variety of theoretical perspectives. We do not expect to provide a single answer or one way of properly looking at the issues involved. Rather, we propose an authorial dialogue that engages multiple vantage-points and brings into juxtaposition the different ways in which we have sought to situate and adjust our anthropological fieldwork, analyses and broader moral gaze to the unstable contrivances of community in a world of movement.

The dialogue is organized around a set of questions which, in their separate sections of the book and in their different ways, both authors set out to address:

In fine, this book provides an investigation into the ways in which anthropology might engage, theoretically, ethnographically, politically, morally, with what might be described as its perennial theme – individuals vis-à-vis communities – in a world of movement which calls into question the erstwhile seeming fixities of its disciplinary identity: ‘culture’ and ‘society’.

ACCORDING TO VERED AMIT

Part I of the book is entitled ‘An Anthropology without Community?’. In recent years, Amit observes, anthropologists have been increasingly willing to accept the ‘loss of place as a dominant metaphor for culture’ (Olwig and Hastrup, 1996: 7). But would they prove as willing to give up the anchorage of collectivity or community? Even more than place, she argues, the notion of collectivity or community has served a fundamental purpose in the anthropological Zeitgeist as the medium for cultural process, mediating between the individual and larger political and economic systems while also framing ethnographies. One should not assume, then, that a reorientation of the anthropological gaze away from localized social relations and practices has necessarily involved an equivalent relocation away from community. To the contrary, there appear to be some indications that the conception of collectivity, or at the very least of collective identity, has become an even more crucial anchor for the efforts of anthropologists attempting to locate transnational or multi-sited ethnographic fields. Collective identities, in short, whether defined in terms of nation, ethnicity, occupation or political movement, are all too often invoked to fill the vacuum of location once filled (literally) by place.

The result, Amit argues, is that so much of the ‘new’ literature on mobile transnationals seems very familiar to readers of an earlier more localized ethnographic literature: labour migrations (now labelled transnational or transmigrant) or ethnic enclaves (albeit now attributed diasporic consciousness). And these foci, far from signalling a new capacity for and interest by anthropologists in dealing with fragmentation, dislocation, destabilization or flux, more often seem to concern integrated and bounded fields of social interaction demarcated by well-entrenched institutions, predictable events and criteria of membership. In anthropology’s dogged search for new delocalized ‘peoples’ the discipline seems in danger of reproducing the fictitiously integrated fields that were once derived from an association between place and culture.

The search for collectivities is propelled by two quite distinct but nonetheless mutually reinforcing impetuses, Amit explains, which provide an epistemological and political context for anthropological research. On the one hand, the small-scale social groups which have traditionally provided the locus for anthropological fieldwork are being incorporated into ever expanding systems of political, economic and cultural connections. These processes of incorporation have thrown question marks around the viability, structure, the very ontology of these social groups.

Anthropologists have had to work harder to account not only for the context in which the group operates but also for its very rationale. On the other hand, anthropology’s reliance on participant observation, its status as a social science and its focus on ‘culture’ all contrive to encourage a continuing bias towards collectivities as the proper locus and subject matter of anthropological investigation. So anthropologists have often continued to seek out collectivities even as many of the processes they were analysing seemed to throw the possibility of community into doubt.

At the same time, in many locales, the politics of multiculturalism and nationalism have increasingly featured claims couched in terms of insistent and essential cultural and communal differences. There is much in identity politics that resonates with anthropological tradition and it can be very tempting to converge a quest for familiar anthropological ‘fields’ with the essentialist categories appearing in public discourses and to justify this as attentiveness to the voices’ of subordinated ‘others’. Both developments – incorporation and the politicization of ‘identity’ – have encouraged a retention of community but increasingly as an idea, a categorical referent rather than an actually mobilized social group. Anthropologists whose fieldwork methods have privileged face-to-face relations now rely on an idea of community increasingly devoid of social content as a means of locating their own practices and gaze.

But there are other kinds of social discourses in which even the ‘idea’ of community cannot act as an ontological anchor. There are many categories of social actors (migrants, students, contract workers, tourist-workers) who are trying to bridge the dislocating and contradictory outcomes of economic restructuring in similar ways but may not be aware of each other; or, if they are, have either not come to think of themselves as sharing a collective identity or else actively resist the possibility. There are individuals who experience repeated cross-border movement without either participating in emergent transnational collectivities or attributing a new social identity to the experience of mobility. Indeed for many, the very premise of social and geographic movement is constituted by a very different paradigm of movement: one of disjunction, compartmentalization and escape.

On the other hand, many other people fashion a sense of more collective fellowship through mundane daily opportunities for consociation, circumstances variously of work, leisure, being neighbours, education and more. In the course of these opportunities, people may come to attach names to familiar faces, share experiences and so establish a sense of contextual fellowship. In short, they may come to feel that, at least for a time, they have something in common. These forms of consociation are often partial, ephemeral, specific to and dependent on particular contexts and activities. And, in many cases, they will not be marked with strong symbolic markers of categorical identity. They are therefore not forms of collectivity that can be accounted for in the oppositional terms of ethnicized identity.

To the extent that anthropologists have recently relied on imagined, oppositional categories of community to locate mobile subjects, they may well be glossing over forms of movement framed in different paradigms of identity as well as forms of social engagement that provide fellowship without necessarily giving rise to highly charged collective categories. Using examples drawn from her previous ethnographic work in Quebec (among youth groups), in Britain (among London Armenians), in the Cayman Islands (among contract expatriate professionals) and also from ongoing research among itinerant professionals based in Canada, Amit’s section of the book is devoted to an investigation of both epistemological and social disaggregation. Here is an elaboration of situations in which she has had to posit ‘fields of investigation’ that do not necessarily conform to fields of social relations but instead involve diffuse fields of personal links and ephemeral groupings; and had to seek out individuals who are conceptually but not personally connected, or, conversely, who do not imagine their personal commonalities in ongoing collective identities.

ACCORDING TO NIGEL RAPPORT

In Part II of the book, entitled ‘The Truth of Movement, the Truth as Movement: Post-Cultural Anthropology and Narrational Identity’, Nigel Rapport draws on his past ethnographic experience (of social interaction in an English village, in a Canadian city, in an Israeli new-town and in a Scottish hospital) so as to prescribe a contemporary anthropological practice at once methodological, theoretical and political. He offers an account of ‘democratic individuality’ and its possible legal underpinnings, of human rights as a discourse of international law whereby to deal with a world in movement, and of an existential anthropology which might do justice to the inherent capacity for creativity, revaluation and irony of the individual subject. If Amit’s section of the book centres on a critique of the assumptions that anthropologists make regarding notions of the ‘collective’ and the ‘cultural’ in connection with their work on ‘community’, then Rapport’s section also encompasses practitioners of community.

In a sympathetic review (2001) Steven Lukes reminds us of Robert Frost’s ironic appreciation of a liberal’ as being someone who could not take his or her own side in an argument. Recent years, however, have seen a shift in sensibility, and an increasing realization among liberal writers of the need to reassert liberalism as a ‘fighting creed’ (Charles Taylor, in Lukes, 2001). This has come about, Lukes explains, in the context of a growing legitimation of communitarian views which posit the basis of identity as being cultural and the basis of agency as being collective. So-called ‘identity politics’ has spawned a doctrine of cultural sovereignty whereby cultural collectives should possess the right to organize their own affairs, since ‘all cultures should be presumed to be of equal value’, and (however contradictorily) ‘there is no common standard by which to evaluate different cultures and the practices they embody’. In the face of this, the ‘fighting liberals’ set out to reclaim a theoretical and a practical universalism. ‘A liberal’ becomes ‘someone who holds that there are certain rights against oppression, exploitation and injury to which every single human being is entitled to lay claim’, and that ‘appeals to cultural diversity and pluralism under no circumstances trump the value of [these basic] rights’ (Barry, 2000). The liberal sets about enshrining these rights in a legal-constitutional framework of citizenship wherein individuals might ideally make free choices amid just institutions. To be sure, one of these choices might be to community membership – even to communities internally organized in terms of illiberal relations of dominance and submission, and in terms of all manner of notions of the good life. The citizenship framework guarantees, however, that these ‘cultures’ do not become empires, and do not become ghettos; the legal framework protects both the rights and interests of those outside the community and also the rights and interests of community members to leave and to choose again. In short, the liberal might not be able (or wish) to ensure a coming together of cultural values and belief-systems but the liberal constitution does ensure that (apologists for) these do not achieve hegemony over individual lives; the latter are protected by universal norms of equality and dignity and by legal judgment. The aim of Rapport’s essay is to translate such ‘fighting liberalism’ into an anthropological world-view.

Rapport begins by depicting cultural relativism as a discourse from which anthropology has yet fully to cut loose; the discipline has continued to reproach itself for practices in the past which furthered the aims of imperialism, colonialism and essentialism. An unfortunate consequence of this self-reproach is that anthropology has continued to seek expiation by way of a cultural relativism which denies, in turn, the contemporary possibility of a critical or aesthetic evolutionism, and decries the espousing of an universalistic morality. Rogue voices have been heard, nevertheless, chief among which, until recently, was probably that of Ernest Gellner (e.g. 1995). For Gellner, to adopt a relativistic stance wherein a ranking or evolution in kinds and ways of knowing was regarded as wicked, was a travesty of cultural reality and a dereliction of social responsibility. Formulating a morality beyond culture, as part of a move towards legitimate, global social relations, was, Gellner felt, of overriding importance (however difficult), while inscribing a knowledge beyond culture was not only possible but already lived as probably the most basic ‘fact of our lives’ (1993: 54). Relativistic anthropology held that the world contained a mosaic of cultures, each with its own version of the universe and its own rights to that version; the reality, however, was that neither such cultural equality nor such cultural autonomy, fixity or coherency existed. The lived reality was that one form of knowledge – scientific – possessed universal and global pertinence. Science represented a cognition which reached beyond any one culture. It entailed an under-standing of nature whose propositions and claims could be translated without loss of efficacy into any milieu, and a technology whose application provided a means of transforming the human condition globally. Instead of pretending that science did not exist, or denying its effects in some attempt at expiation or absolution, Gellner concluded, anthropologists should seek an answer as to how such scientific knowledge and order might be amalgamated within social and cultural multiplicity on a global stage: how sociocultural practices (of ritual and religion, of belonging and opposition, of tradition and community) could be retained as a necessary ‘theatre’ even as civil and political process globally ran than along technical and profane lines (1993:91).

Borrowing Gellner’s distinction between the ‘theatre’ of cultural expression and the procedure of scientific knowledge, Nigel Rapport argues that, while effecting such a distinction cannot be easy or painless, it is a mistake for anthropology to deny its reality. His essay seeks to develop the distinction and explore its ramifications, an exercise in what he terms ‘post-cultural anthropology’. The key to a ‘post-cultural turn’, Rapport contends, concerns a full anthropological appreciation of the individual actor: as conscious, intentioning, creative and ironic. Here individuals are regarded as more than their membership of and participation in cultural communities; for the latter amount less to objectivities than the subjective realizations of those who symbolically articulate and animate them at particular times and places. Cultural communities do not exist in themselves, do not possess their own energies, momentum or agency, and it is less than truthful and more than dangerous for anthropologists to maintain that they do. Rhetorically, communities may represent themselves to themselves, as well as to others, as homogeneous and monolithic, as a priori, but this is an idiom only, a gesture in the direction of solidarity, boundedness and continuity. The reality is of heterogeneity, process and change: of cultural communities as diverse symbolizations which exist by virtue of individuals’ ongoing interpretations and interactions.

It is a mistake, then, for anthropology to take cultural ideologies of collectivity at face value, and further to translate this into so-called rights of cultural difference. Rather than advocating and supporting the supposed collective rights of communities, anthropologists could work towards an accommodation between such ‘theatre’ and the underlying legal rights of individuals. Attachment to a